Thoughts on Canada’s defence MoU with Colombia

On the heels of last week’s announcement in Bogota that Canada will now be an observer to the Pacific Alliance – a collection of four of Latin America’s fastest-growing economies: Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru – Canada announced a bilateral military memorandum of understanding with Colombia this weekend, following the Halifax International Security Forum.

According to a National Defence release, the MoU “provides a strategic framework for the growing defence relationship” between the two countries.

In its release Monday, DND stated that the MoU origninated at the first Canadian-Colombian Defence Policy Talks held in Bogota last February. Those talks, it said, “identified a number of opportunities for further cooperation between our two countries, including military justice, care of the wounded, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, and knowledge sharing on counter-improvised explosive devices.

I asked Philippe Lagassé, a security and defence expert (and assistant professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa) for his thoughts on the MoU. In an e-mail Monday morning, he offered two thoughts on the what the agreement might mean.

“First, it appears that the government is committed to building ties in the Western Hemisphere. We’ve seen this with bilateral trade agreements and bilateral defence arrangements. This agreement is part of this wider initiative. And it is worth noting that the government is serious about linking foreign and defence policy in this instance, which doesn’t always happen,” he wrote.

Second, Lagassé said, “one could make the case that Canada is carving out something of a niche here. It looks like the government wants the Canadian military to be partner of choice in the Western Hemisphere, assisting smaller countries with capacity building, military professionalization, consequence management, and such. It also gives the CF a potentially larger role in counter-narcotics operations.”